Beginning Week Three

Another amazing sunrise this morning.  I didn’t get a picture because we were talking to Steve and Pat, a retired SOWER couple who live on campus who were leaving on vacation.  Steve is retired but works every day here doing maintenance-type stuff.  For the last couple of days he has been burning piles of donated stuff that is not sellable, particularly furniture.  “People donate a lot of junk,” he told us, “and we gotta deal with it.”  So when the wind is right and the smoke will blow across the Snake River, he will buck a lot of it into a pile  with the tractor and light it up.

We were back in Bob and Mary’s double-wide, and the task for today was to hang a sliding closet door.  This and the trim is all that’s left to do in this room.

We got the doors hung, had to make a few adjustments, as usual.  The bottom and top track were an inch too long and needed to be cut down, and that took a while.  The steel-cutting band saw kept throwing its blade.  The reciprocating saw had two dead batteries.  I finally finished the cuts with an old hack saw that was missing a few teeth.  This is why many SOWERs bring their own tools along.  Finding the proper tool and then having it work properly can be a challenge.  Unfortunately, we don’t have the room in our RV.

By the end of the day, however, the doors were up and move back and forth very well.  We’ll work on trimming out the doors and the base of the walls tomorrow.

We had a conversation with Kit Kat over lunch today as we were sitting at the same table.  She is the self-proclaimed cat-whisperer.  We described some of the cats we have seen around campus and then she named them. She has a name and a story for each cat.  All 35 of them.   Lots of unique names.  Like Terminator.  And Muffler.  When we described the white cat we had seen by the goat pen, she told us that one was Terminator.  There are three white cats on campus, but Terminator is the one who hangs out by the goats.

Kit Kat has had a difficult past, but one thing she likes to talk about is cats.

We went out for our last ice cream outing with Steve and Sharon after dinner.  Our evenings seem to be all spoken for.  Birthday party yesterday.  Ice cream today.  Volleyball game tomorrow.  And Wednesday we leave.  Time is getting short.